Month: Aug 2015

My long holiday from blogging has been due, in part, to bipolar disorder and the need for medication, in my case Lithium carbonate, which seems to have a demotivating and anhedonic effect on me – as well as the dampening of my manic behaviours both productive and harmful.
Strip the personal details out of the excellent piece which I am reblogging here; read it and boil it down to the discussion of affect and energy and motivation and volition and self image and dosage.
What I found was a text that describes well the situation I find myself in at present. I’m pretty sure that this is a template that many with bipolar disorder would recognise.
The frustration of trying to explain to others:
“I know what I have to do, step by step, for xyz” but whenever I try to address it – brain fog. As to the NHS: It is such a shame that while I can be prescribed fabulously expensive drugs for weight loss by unnatural means, the option to prescribe gym sessions doesn’t seem to exist.

In January, I wrote about my feelings about my weight, and my history of unhealthy relationships with food and dieting. I concluded the post by saying that I was going to focus not on weighing myself, or dieting, but on choosing real (i.e. not junk, or empty calorie) foods and picking exercise activities that I genuinely enjoyed. That approach worked really well – for about 4 weeks. Then somehow I lost the ability to think kindly towards myself or sensibly about my food choices. I ended up buying a whole new set of clothes for my holiday in a bigger size, and returned from the trip towards the end of March with a renewed Coca-Cola habit and “f*ck it” attitude towards what I ate and drank. Fast forward eight weeks. Now many of the clothes I bought in March no longer fit either. Even my partner, who is usually…